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BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES 

8vo, net, $1.50 

THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD AND THE WORLD RELIGION 

Crown 8vo, net, $1.00 
PARADISE FOUND 

12th edition in preparation 



THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

IN 

MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 

An Illustrated Study for Personal and Class Use 



By WILLIAM FAIRFIELD WARREN 

Professor of Religions and Religion in Boston University 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



Y/3 



Copyright, 1915, by 
WILLIAM FAIRFIELD WARREN 



^■i< 



DEC -8 iyi5 

©CI.A416757 



^^ 



02 
4- 



TO 
PROFESSOR E. CHARLTON BLACK, 

Doctor of Laws (Glasgow University) 

In proof of my high esteem for your character, 
and of my appreciation of your eminent services as 
an interpreter in the vast field of English Literature, 
permit me, my beloved colleague, to inscribe to you 
this brief and imperfect attempt to promote on the 
part of the public, and especially among young 
teachers not possessed of your equipment, a better 
understanding of the poem which many have called 
immortal, and of which William EUery Channing 
writes, that of all monuments of human genius it is 
perhaps the noblest. W. F. W. 



CONTENTS 

PAX3E 

Foreword 9 

Introduction 13 

Illustrative Diagrams: 

1. The Universe of the Opening Scenes of the Poem .... 23 

2. The Universe after the Creation of the Earth and its 

Heavens 27 

3. The Universe as Pictm-ed by the Ancient Babylonians. 31 

Essential Features op Milton's Universe 35 

Subordinate Questions More or Less Cosmographical. . 43 

1. Place of Satan's Second Interview with Sin and Death 43 

2. The Bridge, or Causey, constructed by Sin and Death. 44 

3. The Quadrifurcate River of Eden 46 

4. The Circumfluous Waters 48 

5. The Opening through the ten Spheres for the Passage 

of Angels 50 

6. The Cosmographical Location of Milton's Garden of 

Eden 54 

A Prime Requisite in Studies Like the Present 65 

Appendix. — A Selection of Diagrams for Comparative 

Study 71 

1. Milton's Universe as interpreted by David Masson .. . 73 

2. Milton's Universe as interpreted by George H. Himes 74 

3. Milton's Universe as interpreted by Homer B. Sprague 75 

4. An Alternative Interpretation by Homer B. Sprague. . 76 

5. Milton's Universe as interpreted by Thomas N. Orchard 77 

6. Milton's Universe as repictured by Thomas N. Orchard 78 

7. A Portion of Milton's Hell according to Himes 79 

Index of Names 80 



FOREWORD 

Although Copernicus had finished his Hfe- 
work sixty-eight years before the birth of 
Milton, the traditional geocentric conception 
of the universe was the only one generally held 
and taught at the latter date. Newton was 
as yet unborn, Bacon's Novum Organon yet 
unwritten. Kepler, illustrious improver and 
promoter of the Copernican doctrine, was still 
engaged upon his astronomic problems; but 
even he to his dying day followed tradition 
so far as to believe in the existence of a solid 
sphere, two German miles in thickness, in 
which all the nonplanetary stars were im- 
movably "fixed." Milton was twenty-five years 
of age when Galileo was obliged to make upon 
his knees his historic abjuration of doctrine 
at Rome. Eight years after this our poet 
was in Florence and visited Galileo, but, so 
far as known, without making profession of 
faith in the new heliocentric teaching. In 
that generation the mediaeval conception of 
the world was far more familiar to the peoples 
of Europe than any later one is to-day. And 
it was wonderfully complete and satisfying to 
the reason. In it the world- whole had a known 
center, and this being the Earth, it was one 

9 



10 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

whose centrality seemed ocularly demonstrated 
daily and nightly by the geocentric movements 
of the heavenly bodies. In this same con- 
ception the world-whole had also a known 
circumference within which all beings had 
their appropriate places. This completeness 
and harmony of cosmographic thought we 
have lost. To-day no astronomer can tell 
us what is the center, or what the circum- 
ference of the world in which we are living. 
No wonder that Hegel openly deplored the 
loss of a cosmology so true to appearances, so 
venerable in age, and so dignifying to Man 
as the chief of all creatures. 

In Paradise Lost the poet has prefixed to 
each of the twelve books a so-called "Argu- 
ment," in which he briefly states in plain and 
serviceable prose the contents of the ensuing 
division of the poem. We can but wish he 
had also prefixed to the entire work an equally 
clear account of the universe as it lay in his 
forecasting thought and as it was to find ex- 
pression, here a little and there a little, in his 
rhythmic pages. In twenty lines he could no 
doubt have outlined his Heaven and Earth 
and Hell with a clearness and completeness 
now unattainable by the most painstaking 
interpreter. In the lack of such an authentic 
presentment we can only gather up the cos- 
mographic allusions scattered through the 
twelve books and combine them as harmoni- 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 11 

ously as possible, remembering that they re- 
late to the space-world viewed at three distant 
epochs: (1) a time prior to the creation of 
the present heavens and Earth; (2) a time 
after the creation of the present heavens and 
Earth, but before the establishment of the 
present order of unequal days and diverse 
seasons; and (3) the time since the estabhsh- 
ment of the present order. 

Fortunately, the universe of Paradise Lost 
is no novelty invented by the author for the 
purpose of heightening the charm of his epic. 
It is the universe of his teachers and of his 
time. Its motionless Earth and homocentric 
heavens are essentially the same that we find 
in Plato and Ptolemy, in Aquinas and Dante. 
For this very reason its mastery is all the 
more important and interesting to every person 
as yet unacquainted with it. The study has 
been deplorably neglected for more than a 
century, but there are signs of improvement 
in various quarters, and as an introduction 
thereto the EngUsh language has no master- 
piece so admirably adapted as Paradise Lost. 
In proportion as the following pages shall 
assist younger readers to think Milton's thoughts 
after him, and to gain a realization of the 
beauty and glory of the world in which the 
stately epic moves, in that proportion will 
the desire and aim of the writer be fulfilled. 



INTRODUCTION 

The geocentric world-view of ancient and 
mediaeval thought has been so completely super- 
seded by the Copernican, that beginners in 
the study of Dante and Milton, if unaided 
by instructors of rare qualification, become 
simply bewildered in their efforts to reproduce 
in imagination the localities and dramatic move- 
ments set before them in the masterpieces of 
these authors. One of the most eminent and 
experienced of English professors of literature, 
the late David Masson, well says, 'To every 
edition of the Divina Commedia there ought 
to be prefixed a diagram, however vague and 
crude, of the cosmological scheme adopted in 
the poem, or invented for it." In his opinion, 
students of Milton equally need a diagram of 
the Miltonic universe. Accordingly, he prepared 
and published one with careful explanations of 
Milton's cosmological terms and references; and 
his example has been followed by Himes, 
Sprague, and Orchard. The striking lack of 
agreement, however, between these diagrams 
and explanations shows that if any one of 
them is true to Milton's thought, all the others 
must have misled the students to whom they 
were taught, and must be still misleading as 

13 



/ 



14 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

many readers as rest in them. That they 
may be convenient!}^ compared with each other, 
and with the text of the poem, five are repro- 
duced in an appendix to the present essay. 

The first of the series, that of Professor 
Masson, was the earhest in pubhcation, and 
it has met with more general approval than 
any of the others. To the present writer, 
however, each of the five seems defective in 
more than one particular. The author of 
each has assumed without warrant that both 
Heaven and Hell must be given a definite 
boundary and shape. In each both regions 
are inclosed on every side. It is true that in 
Dr. Orchard's picture Heaven is not roofed in, 
but in his text he twice describes it as "a hemi- 
sphere," and copies Masson's diagram as cor- 
rectly representing it. I cannot think this 
to have been the poet's idea. Like Plato, 
Milton thinks of Heaven as extending illimitably 
above the starry sphere. As if to protest in 
advance against any inclosing or shaping of 
the heavenly world, he expressly warns his 
reader not to attempt to conceive of it as in 
any determinate form, "square or round" 
(ii. 1048). In like manner, as Heaven is sum- 
mitless, so Hell is bottomless. It is true that 
in the exercise of his poetic license, he once 
speaks of a "bottom," and once of a "lowest 
bottom," but elsewhere and more scripturally, 
it is the "bottomless pit" (vi. 866). And for 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 15 

this, one has given a profound reason. '^Be- 
fore the creation of Hell and Earth," says 
Chambers, following Masson, "Chaos occupied 
the whole lower half of Infinitj^"; consequently, 
as Hell's territory is simply the expropriated 
undermost part of the original domain of 
Chaos, according to ii. 1002, it cannot be a 
bounded and shut-in dungeon, but is in reality 
''the dark unbottomed, infinite Abyss" (ii, 405). 
So it should be represented in every picture 
of Milton's cosmology. 

Against the diagram of Professor Himes 
two further faults might be charged. First, 
the panoplied angels falling from his Heaven- 
gate could never have landed in a Hell so 
far removed from the region directly beneath 
Heaven; and, second, he places Hell's gates 
in a perpendicular wall on a level with his 
supposed floor of the region, while in the poem 
these gates are "high in the fiery concave of 
the horrid roof" (ii, 643; compare 635, and 437). 

Without further criticism of preceding inter- 
pretations, the effort will here be made to 
present in ten clear and simple paragraphs 
the essential features of Milton's universe. 
One cannot hope to harmonize to a nicety 
every detail, for the poet is often studiously 
vague, piling up incongruous terms in order 
the better to suggest the inexpressible, and 
to get the psychological effects of ideas in- 
effable. Especially are diagram lines and angles 



16 THE UNIVEESE AS PICTURED 

and measurements helpless and worse than 
helpless in the representation of beings and 
movements essentially superspatial and super- 
temporal. On the other hand, in the realm 
of the strictly finite, no poet has ever given 
us cleaner cut or more harmonious cosmical 
conceptions. One is filled with admiration 
when noting how preadjusted is environment 
to action in every successive scene set before 
us in the unfolding drama. Ages of patient 
thought had prepared the stage. How effect- 
ively we may see in part in Plato. Wonder- 
ful is that cosmic whole presented us in 
Plato's Republic. Wonderful its eight geo- 
centric spheres revolving one within the other 
and together producing the ravishing Music 
of the Spheres. But in Milton's day, in view 
of post-Platonic astronomical problems, two 
additional spheres had been invented, the Crys- 
talline, and the Primum Mobile. The Crys- 
talline was believed to inclose the Earth-inclosing 
eight, and the Primum Mobile to inclose the 
thus resulting nine. So came to its completion 
the so-called Alphonsine cosmology in which 
Milton was instructed and which he taught 
to his pupils. Its universe was one in which 
his contemporaries were thoroughly at home, 
and one which comes to some degree of ex- 
pression in nearly every one of his poems. 
Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare had lived 
in it and beautified it; the Bible, as then in- 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 17 

terpreted, had made it sacred. Earth was the 
divinely appointed center of the creature- world, 
the focus of vision for all intelligences. The 
heavens declared the glory of God by revolving 
around the home of man. Whenever the 
soul of a dying saint was summoned to heaven, 
availing itself of the polar passage described 
in iii, 528, it mounted first to the Earth-inclos- 
ing lunar sphere, then to the higher Earth- 
inclosing sphere of Mercury, then to that of 
Venus, then in its turn to that of the Sun, 
Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; then on and up through 
the sphere which bears the Fixed Stars; then 
on and up through the Crystalline sphere; 
then on and up through the Primum Mobile; 
to and through a Celestial Gate which, im- 
movably fixed high above all ranges of perish- 
able creaturehood, gives entrance to the New 
Jerusalem, the indescribably and unimaginably 
glorious City of God (iii, 481ff.). 

Such is the Universe which every new reader 
of Paradise Lost must needs explore.^ We 
call it Milton's, but in every essential it ante- 
dates Milton by thousands of years. He is 
simply the last of the long line of great masters 
who wrought upon it. As he leaves it, it is 
the consummate product of ages of constructive 
scientific and poetic thinking. As such it 

1 The oldest English setting forth of sixteenth-century cosmography 
with which I am acquainted dates fromi 1549, and is found in the "Mono- 
log Recreative" part of The Complaynte of Scotland, edited for the 
Early English Texts Society by J. A. H. Murray. See pp. 47£F. 



18 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

should be studied, understood, appreciated; 
then taught to each new generation as one 
of the choicest treasures of the human race. 

To aid the reader in connecting and readily 
understanding the offered theses two diagrams 
are prefixed, neither of which has before been 
published. Then to show how far the essen- 
'^tial features of Milton's Universe antedate the 
age of Ptolemy, and even that of Plato, a 
third diagram is added, in which the world- 
view of the ancient Babylonians is presented. 
This last was published in the Journal of the 
Royal Asiatic Society of London, in the year 
1908, and respecting it Professor Sayce, of 
Oxford University, wrote, "It entirely satisfies 
all requirements of the Babylonian inscriptions, 
which is not the case with any other that has 
hitherto been brought forward." 

In tracing the history of this remarkably 
complete and harmonious world-view from age 
to age, down to the time of Milton, the student 
will find valuable aid in Dreyer's ''Planetary 
Systems from Thales to Kepler." But Dreyer 
confines himself so strictly to European astron- 
omers and cosmologists that, in the lack of 
recent English works of a more comprehensive 
character, it has been necessary to refer in 
the following pages with some frequency to 
writings of my own in this field, namely, to 
Earliest Cosmologies (New York, 1909), and 
Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 19 

Race at the North Pole (Boston, 11th edition, 
1898). This latter is temporarily out of print, 
but a twelfth edition, with literature to date, 
is in preparation. Meantime it' is a gratifying 
sign of growing interest in these studies that 
in England Dr. Orchard's Astronomy of Milton's 
Paradise Lost has lately reached its second 
edition. No previous writer has presented 
this branch of our subject in a form so scholarly 
and attractive, and it is a pleasure to commend 
it to all readers of our poet. 



tCfte ®nitjer5e pefore tfje Creation of 
tt)e Cartli anb Stsi ?|eabens{ 



HEAVEN 

CULMINATING 

IN THE MOUNT AND THRONE OF GOD 




HELL, TERMINATING IN THE 

BOTTOMLESS 

P I T 



23 



®f)e Bainibersie after tfje Creation of 
tlie Cartl) anl» 3ts; ?|eabeng 



HEAVEN 

CULMINATING 

IN THE MOUNT AND THRONE OF GOD 




HELL, TERMINATING IN THE 

BOTTOMLESS 

PIT 



27 



Snctent pabplontans 



ZEtilTM 




THE BABYLONIAN UNIVERSE 

(The upper hemispheres cut away to show the interior) 

The upright line is the polar axis of the heavens and earth. The two seven-staged pyramids repre- 
sent the earth, the upper beins; the abode of Uving men, the under one the abode of the dead. The sep- 
arating waters are the four seas. The seven inner homocentric globes are respectively the domains and 
special abodes of Sin, Shamash, Nabu, Ishtar, Nergal, Marduk, and Ninib, each being a "world-ruler" in 
his own planetary sphere. The outermost of the spheres, that of Anu and Ea, is the heaven of the fixed 
stars. In this world-view the spaces between the spheres widen rapidly at each remove from the Earth — 
so rapidly, in fact, that in a diagram of this size they cannot be represented otherwise than as above. 



31 



THE ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF THE 

UNIVERSE AS PICTURED IN 

PARADISE LOST 



THE ESSENTIAL FEATURES OF THE 

UNIVERSE AS PICTURED IN 

PARADISE LOST 

I. The opening scenes of the poem bring 
to view three spatially distinct regions: (1) 
Heaven, the angelic world culminating in the 
Mount of God; (2) Hell, or the bottomless 
pit, a place prepared and held in readiness 
for the rebel angels; (3) an interlying region 
filled with Chaos, and of such enormous depth 
as to require nine days for a falling body to 
drop through it (vi. 671). 

II. The limitless space in which the three 
regions coexist is represented as having a 
center and poles (i, 74); it must therefore be 
conceived of as orbicular, or spherelike. It 
will be found convenient to call it Milton's 
Macrocosm, in order to distinguish it from 
the later-created solar and stellar system which 
Milton sometimes calls "the World." To this 
Macrocosm he once seems to apply the term, 
'^the hollow universal Orb" (vii, 257). 

III. In the poetic descriptions the region of 
Chaos is always immediately above Hell, and 
immediately below Heaven; accordingly, viewed 
from the center of the spherelike whole. Heaven 
is ever at the zenith, and Hell at the nadir 

35 



36 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

of the observer. Accordingly the polar axis 
of the sphere is absolutely perpendicular in 
position. 

IV. Heaven is separated from the realm of 
Chaos by the ethereal sky (i, 45), or by the 
Empyrean (vi, 833; x, 380). Being skyUke, 
the Empyrean is most naturally conceived of 
as a hollow sphere, or world-shell, the lower 
half of which in like manner separates Hell 
from the realm of Chaos. Even Masson in 
the first of his diagrams represented the Empy- 
rean, not as a hemispherical vault, but as a 
complete sphere (Life of Milton, vol. vi, p. 529). 

V. The upper or northern, and the lower 
or southern, halves of the universe are counter- 
parts with various answering features; for ex- 
ample, a Heaven-gate and a Hell-gate; a mount 
of God and a mount of Satan; summitless light 
and bottomless darkness. In the world-whole, 
however, the direction ''downward" is not 
toward the mathematical center of the Earth 
(as invariably in Dante's world), but always 
toward a point in or below the lowest hell. 

VI. The "gap" through which the rebel 
angels were driven out of Heaven is identical 
in position, and in function, with the elsewhere 
often mentioned Heaven-gate (vi, 861-879; ii, 
990-997). 

VII. Corresponding in purpose to the 
Heaven-gate above is the Hell-gate beneath, 
each giving in opposite directions the only 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 37 

available passage from the domain of Chaos 
to the space outside. By reason of their posi- 
tions in the world-shell they can be passed 
through only in an upward or downward 
direction. The language of the poem implies 
that the Hell-gate is plumb-linearly^ beneath 
the Gate of Heaven (x. 88-90; v. 253-270; 
vii. 131-135; ii. 884-889). 

VIII. The new ''world/' created within the 
ancient realm of Chaos in the ''six days" 
mentioned in Genesis, may conveniently be 
styled The Cosm, to distinguish it from the 
vaster Macrocosm which on every side incloses it. 
As represented by the poet, it consists of the 
ten homocentric spheres of mediaeval astronomy 
with the "sedentary" or "steadfast" Earth as 
their center (vii, 192ff.). In all likehhood 
The Cosm is to be pictured in thought as 
homocentric with The Macrocosm, for this 
supposition is in harmony with the geocentric 
theories of the universe maintained by the 
ancients, and any other adjustment seems to 
destroy the symmetry of the total system. 

IX. In the thirteenth stanza of his Hymn 
of the Nativity, Milton speaks of the "Nine- 
fold harmony" of the "Crystal Spheres," and 
in Arcades, line 64, he mentions the "nine 
infolded spheres." These expressions seem to 



2 The reader must pardon the unfamiliar adverb derived from the 
plumb line, for no other term can express the sense with equal accuracy. 



38 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

imply that his newly created world lacked the 
tenth of the Alphonsine world-shells, the so- 
called Primum Mobile. On the other hand, 
in one of his Latin poems, the De Idea Platonica, 
line 17, he speaks of the ''Tenfold heaven" 
(Coeli decemplicis) . Furthermore, in Paradise 
Lost (iii, 483, and 562) he expressly refers 
to the Primum Mobile (the "first," counting 
from heaven, but the tenth counting from the 
Earth). This apparent discrepancy as to the 
number of the geocentric heavens is probably 
to be explained on the theory that in Milton's 
thought the music of the spheres was produced 
by the motion of the divinely attuned material 
spheres, and that the tenth was soundless 
because by nature immaterial. Other thinkers 
before him had thus conceived of the outer- 
most sphere as purely kinetic, and incessantly 
in action to maintain the revolutions of the 
material harmony-producing nine. 

X. The center of the new creation was the 
Earth; which, in its original perfection, was a 
"terrestrial heaven danced round by other 
heavens" (ix, 103). The question whether 
this central orb itself revolved Raphael leaves 
unsettled (viii, 15ff., 70f.). Above it on every 
side was the firmament, which was simply an 

Expanse of liquid, pure, 
Transparent, elemental air, diffused 
In circuit to the uttermost convex 
Of this great round (vii, 264). 



'h 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 39 

Above this transparent elemental air on every 
side were waters, the so-called ''waters above 
the firmament." As these did not hide the 
stars from the view of men, they must be 
thought of as usually vaporized to the point 
of invisibility, though ever ready for recon- 
densation and for descent in the form of rain 
or snow. Viewed from a distance, these super- 
aerial waters, being a complete Earth-inclosing 
hydrosphere, would be as present below the 
Earth as above it, and in this sense the Earth 
could be said to be 

Built on circumfluous waters calm, in wide 

Crystalline ocean (vii, 270). 

The polar axis of the Earth was originally 
perpendicular to the plane of the Zodiac. As 
a consequence, all days were equal in length, 

and 

Spring 
Perpetual smiled on Earth with vernant flowers (x, 678). 

At each pole the low sun daily ''rounded the 
horizon," instead of rising and setting, the 
motion being from left to right at the northern 
pole, but from right to left at the southern. 
At both 

Day unbenighted shone (1, 681). 

After the fall of man, however, by divine 
command, the angels "turned askance the 
poles," and in consequence the path of the 
sun was changed, days of unequal length pro- 



40 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

ducedj and the alternations of summer and 
winter. Tempests followed and all the dis- 
cords of the natural world. From line 692, 
however, it would seem that in the poet's view 
these were ''slow" changes, and not effected 
all at once.^ 



' This suggestion of Milton's as to the origin of unequal days and 
diverse seasons in a displacement of the Earth's poles is no fancy orig- 
inating in his poetic mind. It is a remarkable fact that nearly every 
great thinker in the earliest period of Greek philosophy taught that in 
the world's beginning the axis of the Earth was perpendicular to the 
sun's orbit, and that its present inclination is due to some prehistoric 
change. Meager as are our extant fragments of the writings of Em- 
pedocles, Leukippos, Anaxagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia, and Archelaus, 
said fragments jaeld evidence that all of these pioneer astronomers held 
this view. See Dreyer, History of Planetary Systems from Thales to 
Kepler, 1906, pp. 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 34. Dreyer also shows that the 
sphericity of the Earth was as well known to the ancient astronomers 
and their successors as it was to Columbus. Planetary Systems, pp. 20, 
38, 39, 53, 55, 117, 158, 172, 192, 220, 223, 225, 227, 229, 239, 242, 243, 
249, 250. For a diagram of the Earth as conceived of and described by 
Columbus, see Paradise Found, p. 307. In our day few are aware that 
he felt himself called upon to correct the error of those who maintained 
that the Earth is really a sphere. 



SUBORDINATE QUESTIONS MORE OR 
LESS COSMOGRAPHICAL 



SUBORDINATE QUESTIONS MORE OR 
LESS COSMOGRAPHICAL 

To this point the recovery of the Miltonic 
Universe has not been difficult. All state- 
ments in the ten numbered paragraphs seem 
clearly set forth or implied in the poem. More- 
over, with the resulting picture of Milton's 
world in mind, any reader of Paradise Lost 
can follow the rapidly succeeding movements 
of the Dramatis Personse — celestial, terrestrial, 
and infernal — without losing at any time his 
spatial bearings. There remain, however, a 
few minor questions of a more or less cosmo- 
graphical nature for whose solution the data 
presented in the text of the poem seem in- 
adequate. To elicit fresh investigations a few 
of these may here be mentioned. 

1. The Locality of Satan's Second Inter- 
view WITH Sin and Death. — When we ask 
where Satan is supposed to be at the time 
of his second interview with Sin and Death 
we encounter a peculiar textual difficulty. Just 
at the moment of the meeting Satan is repre- 
sented as "now returned to Hell" (x, 346); 
and as being "near the foot" of the upright 
structure built by Sin and Death from Hell- 
gate to the level reached by the golden Heaven- 

43 



44 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

stair. His location, therefore, as at or near 
Hell-gate, seems doubly indicated; (1) he has 
returned from Earth to his own infernal abode; 
and (2) he is at the ''foot" of a viaduct which 
rises from that abode to the summit of the ten 
homocentric heavens. But, strangely enough, 
some lines further on, as Satan is closing his 
speech, he is evidently, not at the bottom, 
but at the top of the bridge. On it he pro- 
poses to ''descend" to Hell (1, 394); on it he 
does "descend" (1, 414); furthermore, to reach 
the terrestrial Paradise Sin and Death must 
"descend" (1, 398); all three of them are "near 
Heaven's door" (1, 389). Has the poet in 
closing the scene forgotten where he began it? 
That seems incredible. Have we evidence 
here, then, of inadvertence on the part of 
some one of the poet's numerous amanuenses? 
This also seems incredible, for there is no one 
word or clause, failure to catch which would 
account for the discrepancy. 

2. The Bridge, or Causey, Constructed 
BY Sin and Death. — The viaduct built "with 
petrific mace" from Hell through Chaos to 
the realms of light has been differently located, 
and differently shaped, by different interpreters. 
Of the five diagrams in our Appendix but one. 
Dr. Orchard's, represents it.^ He starts the 

* This paragraph was written a few days before Doctor Orchard pub- 
lished his new diagram, the one in which, in form and in position, The 
Bridge is represented as by Masson. To this our criticism does not 
apply. 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 45 

structure at a point in Hell quite removed 
from the ninefold Gate, and carries its head 
in as straight a line as is well possible to the 
foot of the Heaven-stair. Masson does not 
picture it but tells us how it may be inserted 
in his diagram. He says: "The bridge not only 
followed the track which Satan had taken 
across Chaos, but it terminated, in adamantine 
fastenings, exactly at the spot ('the selfsame 
place') on the bare outside shell or Primum 
Mobile of the Cosmos where Satan had alighted 
after his toilsome flight; i. e. on its upper 
boss, near the orifice where the Cosmos was 
suspended from the Empyrean. If the reader, 
then, will take the diagram in the Introduction, 
and draw with pen or pencil a curved line, 
from the middle of what is there the arched 
roof of Hell, upwards on the left hand into 
the angle made by the equatorial line and the 
circumference of the little circle representing 
the Cosmos, that line will mark the track of 
the bridge built by Sin and Death. The some- 
what obscure five lines 320-324 will then be 
perfectly intelligible; for it will then be seen 
how 'in little space the confines met of Empy- 
rean Heaven, and of this World, and on the 
left hand Hell with long reach interposed.' 
But what are 'the three several ways' leading 
'in sight to each of these three places'? The 
bridge itseK is one of them, leading to Hell; 
the mystic stair, or golden passage of communi- 



46 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

cation, up from the orifice into the Empyrean, 
described at iii, 501-522, is another; and the 
downward shaft into the Cosmos from the 
same orifice right to Earth, described in the 
continuation of that passage (iii, 523-539), is 
the third." 

Here then, in place of Orchard's essentially 
straight bridge, we have one curved from end 
to end. Moreover, the two differ as to the 
location of the foot of the structure, Orchard 
erroneously carrying it far to the left of Hell- 
gate. Stopford Brooke, in his Milton Primer, 
page 87, agrees with Masson as to the location 
of the foot, but carries its head only to "the 
base'' of the Cosm. Apparently, he agrees 
with Orchard, and differs from Masson, in 
making the structure rectilinear. The parallel- 
ism of the Bridge to the Heaven-stair, in its 
function, favors Brooke's interpretation, but the 
reading of the text in its present state at x, 312ff., 
clearly bars it out.^ 

3. The Quadrifurcate River of Eden, 

AND THE QUADRIUNE RiVER OF HeLL. — In the 

Biblical account of Eden, Gen. 2. 10, we read 
of a Paradisaic stream, which was "parted" 
and "became four" world-watering rivers. On 



5 In The Dial, of Chicago, March 7, 1915, under the caption, "Did 
Milton Nod?" I called attention to the textual difficulty in book ten,, 
and to its necessary bearing upon our conception of the Bridge, asking 
at the same time for any suggestion that might be helpful. In response, 
an Iowa correspondent printed in the same organ, issue of March 18, a 
communication which I find difficult to understand, but to which I am 
glad to refer any reader in search of further light. 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 47 

the other hand, in Paradise Lost, ii, 575, we 
read of four infernal rivers, which unite, and 
become one, as they together disgorge their 
baleful streams into a burning lake.^ Does 
Milton desire the reader to counterpose these 
two pictures and so constitute a further in- 
verted parallelism between the Upper and the 
Underworld? 

Probably not. Had this been his wish, he 
would naturally have made his Fountain by 
the Tree of Life, ix, 73, one that sent four 
streams to four opposing points of the com- 
pass. In iv, 433, he almost does this, yet not 
quite. It starts many questions to discover, 
outside of the book of Genesis, such a four- 
faced Fountain; and to find it in most of the 
great mythologies of antiquity. In not a few 
it is regarded as the one headspring of all 
the waters of the world. It is clearly traceable 
in the Rig Veda, in Homer's Iliad, in the 
Puranas of India and Suttas of China. In 
his Vorchristliche Unsterhlichkeitslehre, vol. ii, 
p. 6, WoKgang Menzel affirms that the four 
infernal rivers of Greek mythology are antipodal 
counterparts to the four Paradise rivers of the 
Upperworld. Dante teaches nearly the same 
thing, for his one stream rising on the summit 
of the terrestrial Paradise later feeds the four 
rivers of HeU. 



* Professor Himes's interpretation of the relation of the four infernal 
rivers to Lethe is given in our Appendix. 



48 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

On this topic the interested reader may 
find much curious and suggestive matter in 
Paradise Found, particularly in the chapter on 
'The Quadrifurcate River," pp. 250-261. See 
also Earhest Cosmologies, pp. 74, 98, 116, 190, 
195, 206. 

4. The Circumfluous Waters. — How Mil- 
ton intended us to picture the "circumfluous 
waters in wide Crystalline ocean" (vii, 270), 
is a problem not easy of solution. Dr. Orchard, 
if I correctly understand him, describes them 
as a ''Jasper Sea," annular in shape, perpetually 
in a horizontal motion around the northern 
pole of the ninth sphere, close to the foot of 
the Heaven-stair. So viewed, the waters are 
a circular river without head-spring or em- 
bouchment, like Lethe in Himes's diagram of 
the Infernal Rivers. What purpose such a 
river could there serve he does not explain, 
and it is hard to imagine any. Moreover, 
the statement that the Cosm was built "on" 
these circumfluous waters seems to bar out 
such an interpretation. Is it not more likely 
that Milton had in mind the "refluent Okeanos- 
river" of the Greeks, "which Aristotle describes 
as having its origin in the upper heavens, 
descending thence in rain upon the earth, 
feeding, as Hesiod, Homer, and Euripides said, 
all fountains and rivers, and every sea; then 
branching out into the rivers of the Under- 
world, to be returned fire-purged and sublimated 



IN MILTON'S PAEADISE LOST 49 

to the upper heavens, there to recommence 
its round"? (John O'Neill, "The Night of 
the Gods," vol. ii, p. 866.) The Avestan 
picture of the unitary water-circulation of the 
universe as the Iranians conceived it presents 
a most interesting parallel, as may be seen 
in Paradise Found, pages 251-254. Verity, in 
his edition of Milton, seems to make the ninth 
sphere consist of water (''a vast expanse of 
waters"), but says nothing as to the existence, 
direction or purpose of any "flow." The 
purpose of the so-conceived water-envelope 
above the eighth sphere is said by him to be 
"to protect the Earth from the 'evil influences' 
of Chaos; those 'fierce extremes' of temperature 
which might penetrate through the outside 
shell (the Primum Mobile), and 'distemper' the 
whole fabric of the universe did not this wall 
of water interpose (vii, 272-273)." Some of 
the mediaeval writers assign the same regulative 
function, especially a cooling one, to what are 
called in the Bible "the waters above the 
firmament." As in Paradise Lost, according to 
Verity, the air extends all the way from the 
Earth to the Crystalline sphere; his identifica- 
tion of the waters above the firmament with 
a sphere of waters above the sphere of the 
Fixed Stars involves no inconsistency. It 
remains difficult, however, to understand how 
the Primum Mobile could apply to the ninth 
sphere the force necessary to give due rotary 



50 THE UNIVEESE AS PICTURED 

motion to it and to the eight inferior spheres 
in case the ninth was nothing more than a 
vast bubblehke globe of water. In any case 
Milton himseK has not fully defined his thought 
on this point. 

Right here it is interesting to note that in 
the ^'College Exercise," Hues 34-52, a poem 
written in his nineteenth year, our poet recog- 
nizes with touches of rare beauty each of the 
four subcelestial, concentric Elemental Spheres 
of the ancient Greek tradition — those of "Fire, 
Air, Water and Earth"; and all of them in 
the orthodox order of their sequence, taking 
''Heaven's Door" as one's starting point. Inas- 
much, however, as in line 41 he does not 
sharply separate the aqueous stratum from the 
aerial, it is difficult to say how far he would 
have us separate his subaerial waters from the 
superaerial, or waters above the firmament. 
This obscurity, it must be added, is by no 
means peculiar to Milton. The reader will 
find a remarkable array of conflicting inter- 
pretations of this elusive term, "firmament," 
set forth in Earliest Cosmologies, pp. 44, 45, 
footnote. 

5. The Axial Opening through the Ten 
Spheres for the Passage of the Angels. — 
Some interpreters of Milton's universe have 
missed the true conception of the geocentric 
spheres by picturing at least nine of them as 
nothing more than imaginary divisions of empty 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 51 

space/ They do not deny that the poet de- 
scribes the outermost as a substantial, space- 
occupying world-shell, but they are fond of 
calling all the others defined ''portions of 
transpicuous space." A sufficient refutation of 
this view seems to me to be found in the "Pas- 
sage wide" mentioned in iii, 527ff. If the nine 
spheres are not conceived of as entities which 
occupy space, what call can there be for an 
open passage to serve as a free highway be- 
tween Heaven and Earth? Furthermore, on 
this interpretation, no passage could be called 
''wide," for any passage, in any direction, on 
any side of the Earth, would be as wide as 
the whole interior diameter of the Primum 
Mobile. As far up as the eighth the spheres 
are, of course, transpicuous, since otherwise the 
stars would never be visible to men, but in 
the poet's thought they are ever present in 
their proper places and motions.^ Milton's 
doctrine of the transmutability of body into 
spirit and of spirit into body (v, 407ff.) sug- 
gests caution in applying to the spheres the 
term "corporeal" or "material," but we are 
surely warranted in conceiving of them as 
not less real and space-occupying than are the 
ninefold gates of Hell, or the Archangel Michael 

^ See Verity, vol. i, p. 141. And yet on the preceding page, 140, he 
himself says of Milton's Earth, "It is encased by numerous shells." 

* Dante does not hesitate to call even the ninth sphere a "corpo." 
See the very valuable essay on "The Astronomy of Dante," in Edward 
Moore's "Studies in Dante," Third Series, 1903, p. 15. 



52 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

and his panoplied host. Indeed, the concep- 
tion here criticized is absolutely unthinkable. 
How can nine defined portions of the one 
transpicuous space move one within the other 
in the one unmoving transpicuous space that 
includes them all? In vacuo there can be no 
moving vacua. 

The passage here provided for the angels 
is a wide opening at the upper pole of each of 
the ten geocentric globes (v. 269). Naturally, 
it cannot be elsewhere, for the spheres are 
revolving at different rates of speed, and any 
perforation not near the axial line, even if 
made, would instantly be closed by one or 
another of the whirling heavens. At the pole, 
and there only, can the opening remain open, 
and so afford a permanent passageway for the 
ascending and descending messengers of God 
(see Orchard's diagram). Gazing down the 
passage from the Heaven-gate, or the Heaven- 
stair, eyes of angelic range would survey, not 
successive portions of an Earth which was 
perpetually rolling over, but, on the contrary, 
the complete perpetually present northern hemi- 
sphere of an Earth as stable as the throne 
of the Almighty himself (v. 258ff.). Each 
Earth-inclosing sphere was transpicuous, for 
through them the stars adorning the eighth 
were visible to men.^ At the same time each 



• Aquinas, in a single sentence, expressly teaches us (1) the sub- 
stantiality of these heavens, (2) their transpicuousness, and (3) the 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 53 

was conceived of as a substantial shell-like 
creation, with strength to bear each its "officious 
lamp" (ix, 104). The invisible lunar sphere 
bore upon some part of its exterior surface 
the visible moon; the invisible Mercurial sphere 
the visible Mercury; the third sphere the 
dazzling Sun; the fourth, lovely Venus, and 
so on. Each of the inner eight had a distinctive 
light and color; each a distinctive rate of 
revolution; each a distinctive note in the 
diapason of the resulting ''ninefold harmony." 
Small wonder that on his first view into such 
a divinely beautiful and musical revolving 
kaleidoscope of almost infinite dimensions, 
''wonder seized" the spirit malign (1. 552). 

At this point the question may be raised 
whether in his flight precipitant down the 
polar passage Satan alighted on the sun we 
see, or upon the invisible Earth-inclosing "solar 
sphere" at some other point. Probably ninety- 
nine out of every hundred readers fail to re- 
member that the interview with Uriel could 
have been elsewhere than on the visible sun. 
Most likely it was so viewed in the poet's mind, 
since the archangelic Regent of the sphere 
would naturally be interviewed in the most 
glorious of his palaces. Still, if one reads 
lines 588-590 carefully, and strongly emphasizes 

proof that these qualities cannot be mutually exclusive: "Sed quia corpus 
firmamenti etsi sit solidum, est tanien diaphanum quod lumen non impedit, 
ut patet per hoc quod lumen stellarum videmus non obstantibus mediis 
caelis," etc. (Summa, I, Ixvi, 3). 



54 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

the word ''lucent/' it becomes plain that the 
other interpretation is not ruled out. Here, 
as everywhere in these studies, we cannot too 
painstakingly watch the important distinction 
between the Earth-inclosing sphere and the 
^'lamp" of service which it bears. (Compare 
''Earliest Cosmologies," pp. 101, 118, 199.) 

6. The Cosmographical Location of Mil- 
ton's Paradise. — For centuries the true site 
of the biblical Garden of Eden was persistently 
sought, not only by Jewish and Christian 
theologians, but also by explorers and travelers 
in various parts of the earth. Extraordinary 
theories were proposed and defended. More 
than two hundred years ago Bishop Huet 
deplored the lack of certainty, and wrote: 
"Some have placed it in the third heaven, 
some in the fourth; some in the heaven of the 
moon, in the moon itself, on a mountain near 
the lunar heaven, in the middle region of 
the air, out of the earth, upon the earth, be- 
neath the earth, in a place that is hidden and 
separated from man. It has been placed 
under the northern pole, in Tartary, or in the 
place now occupied by the Caspian Sea. Others 
have placed it in the extreme south, in Terra 
del Fuego; others in the Levant, or on the 
shores of the Ganges, or in the island of Ceylon. 
It has been placed in China, or in an inacces- 
sible region beyond the Black Sea; by others 
in America, in Africa, and so on." The dis- 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 55 

cussion has continued to the present time, 
and it is interesting to learn from one of his 
letters that Livingstone was sustained in his 
tireless perambulations in the Dark Continent 
by the firm belief that if he could once reach 
the source of the Nile, he would stand upon 
the very site of the primeval Paradise. 

Milton, like Dante, locates his Garden of 
Eden with great definiteness. It is remarkable, 
however, that the locality he indicates is 
about as far removed from that indicated by 
Dante as was anyway possible on the surface 
of the same Earth. Milton's is at the summit 
of an incomparably lofty mountain in Western 
Asia, more exactly on the northernmost frontier 
of Assyria (iv, 208ff.); Dante's, on the other 
hand, on the summit of an incomparably lofty 
mountain in the then unexplored South Pacific 
Ocean, exactly antipodal to Jerusalem (Purg. 
iv, 68; xxviii, 118-142). But these locations 
are geographic merely, not cosmographic. In 
other words, they leave us in each case un- 
certain as to the aboriginal, or even the later, 
zenith of the Terrestrial Paradise in the thought 
of the poet. As to Milton's conception, we 
learn from v, 258-260, that to Raphael, gazing 
down the polar passage through the ten re- 
volving spheres, the Garden was distinctly 
visible; but as this was before man sinned and 
before the poles were turned askance, we can 
only infer that in the poet's mind the sacred 



56 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

site was at that time in the northern hemi- 
sphere, and its zenith north of the celestial 
equator in the eighth sphere. ^° Precisely at 
the northern pole the Garden and its zenith 
cannot then have been, for before Raphael's 
interview with Adam was concluded the sun 
was sinking toward its daily setting (vii, 98); 
and, as we have seen, Milton well understood 
that in his primal adjustment of the spheres 
there could be no sunsets or sunrisings at 
the poles of the earth (x, 689). 

But while our poet leaves so much of uncer- 
tainty with respect to the astronomic bearings 
of his Paradise Mountain, he does not leave 
us uninformed as to its destined translocation 
into the deep sea. Among the things fore- 
shown by Michael to Adam is the coming of 
the Universal Deluge, and here the Archangel 
adds: 

"Then shall this Mount 
Of Paradise by might of waves be moved 
Out of his place, pushed by the horned flood, 

10 In reading Dante's grotesque suggestion in Inferno xxxiv, 121ff., one 
wonders between which constellations of the eighth sphere the poet 
imagined Lucifer to have passed in his headlong fall in line with Eden to 
his fixed lodgment in the frozen center of the Earth. The poem gives 
us no light upon the question, but it is some relief to know that its 
author well understood the precession of the equinoxes and the neces- 
sary effect of the processional movement upon the zenith at every point 
of the Earth's surface from century to century from the beginning to the 
end of the thirty-six thousand years assigned by Ptolemy for the com- 
pletion of the Magnus Annus (Purg. xi, 108; also i, 24; xxxiv, 1-7, with 
notes of Castrogiovanni). Even the Southern Cross, here associated 
with pristine humanity, settles nothing, for the astronomers assure us 
that ages ago, and still long after the beginnings of human history, the 
Southern Cross was visible in Siberia. 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 57 

With all his verdure spoiled, and trees adrift, 

Down the great river to the op'ning gulf. 

And there take root, an island salt and bare. 

The haunt of seals, and ores, and sea-mews' clang; 

To teach thee that God attributes to place 

No sanctity, if none be thither brought 

By men who there frequent, or therein dwell" (xi, 829). 

What a subject for the pencil of a Gustave 
Dore ! I can recall no parallel picture in Homer, 
Vergil, or Dante. 

In Paradise Regained (iii. 251ff.), Milton 
locates with some definiteness the ''exceeding 
high mountain" to which the devil conveyed 
our Lord for his third and crowning tempta- 
tion; but while its summit, like that of the 
original Paradise Mountain, overlooked Assyria, 
he nowhere tells us that the two mountains 
are one and the same. On the contrary, he 
distinguishes them (Paradise Lost, xi, 381) and 
seems to picture the former as something 
almost, if not quite, spectral and supernatural 
(Paradise Regained, iv, 40-42). Of course he 
could hardly do otherwise, if from its top 
all the kingdoms of the Earth were to be 
surveyed. 

But while our poet has not located the 
triumph of Jesus over the Tempter in the 
precise locality in which the Tempter triumphed 
over Eve and Adam, the luring poetic fitness 
of such a procedure is evident. And for cen- 
turies past the pilgrim to Jerusalem has been 



58 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

interested to find that local tradition at that 
chief of our holy places has identified the 
place of Man's Fall with the place of Man's 
Redemption by asserting that Primitive Eden 
was where the Holy City now stands. Little 
Gihon, he is told, is what now remains of the 
original Paradise river of that name. For 
further proof, the very tomb of Adam and 
Eve is pointed out to him. According to this 
teaching, the Garden of Eden and the Garden 
of Gethsemane consecrate the same soil and 
are framed in the same horizon. As late as 
1862 an Englishman, W. Henderson, published 
in London a defense of this view, entitling 
his tractate, '^Identity of the Scenes of Man's 
Creation, Fall, and Redemption" (see Paradise 
Found, pp. 231-233). One can but wonder 
what Dante would have said to such a point- 
blank inversion of his cosmographical teaching! 
In the immemorially ancient mythical geog- 
raphy of the East Aryans we have a picture 
of the cradle of the human race which in several 
respects surpasses that presented by Milton. 
It includes one of the most striking of the 
biblical features, the Quadrifurcate River. It 
represents ''Beautiful Meru" as the loftiest 
mountain in the world, so high that its head 
penetrates the lunar sphere, and there sup- 
ports the throne-city of Indra, one of the 
gods. As it stands exactly at the north pole, 
the sun, moon, and all the stars move ma- 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 59 

jestically round it in horizontal orbits from 
left to right. In its immovable position it is 
always directly under the northern pole of all 
the higher heavens, even to that of Great 
Brahma, the highest and most powerful of all 
the gods. Here neither it, nor the sun, ever 
really, or in appearance, goes under the Earth. 
Its crest being a favorite resort of the gods, 
the gardens and trees of life with which it 
is adorned are more celestial than terrestrial. 
From a higher-up heaven there descends upon 
it a pure and life-giving stream which, descend- 
ing thence in four opposite directions as four 
world-rivers, waters the whole Earth. Here 
originated the first progenitors of the human 
family, and from this polar center they pro- 
ceeded to people the different varshas of the 
habitable Earth. See diagram and exposition 
in Paradise Found, pp. 148-154. 

Exactly under Beautiful Meru, the Moun- 
tain of the Gods, stands at the south pole its 
inverted counterpart, the Mountain of the 
Demons. The one is inexpressibly bright and 
glorious, the other the abode of darkness and 
of all that is evil. To pass from the upper 
hemisphere to the lower one must pass the 
River of Death. In the oldest traceable beliefs 
of the ancient Iranians also we find the same 
conception of the figure of the Earth and 
the same idea of the starting-point of the 
earliest men (Paradise Found, p. 134). Indeed, 



60 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

according to Lenormant, the essential feature 
of this central Earth with antipodal polar 
mountains of incomparable magnitude, and of 
antagonistic spiritual significance, dates back to 
the earliest of all known Asiatic peoples, the 
Sumero-Babylonians (Paradise Found, p. 123n). 
The corresponding antipodality of Dante's Hell- 
cavity and Mount for scaling the Heavens 
leads one to wonder whether, even he had 
not read of the old Asiatic conception of the 
antipodal polar mountains, and whether he did 
not deliberately invert the demonian one in 
order to locate the embodying principle of 
evil as far as possible beneath the soil on which 
was committed the most diabolic of all his- 
toric, and of all conceivable deeds, the slaying 
of the one Earth-tenant "who was born and 
lived without sin" (Inf. xxxiv, 115). If such 
was really the origin of Dante's cosmos" in its 
central feature, it reflects all the greater credit 



11 A diagram of Dante's Earth and Hell is given in Paradise Found, 
page 307. Others showing his Heavens, Earth and Hell, have been pub- 
lished by many scholars. The lack of agreement in these is sometimes 
surprising. For example, in the one prefixed to Rossetti's "Shadow of 
Dante," The Rose of the Blessed in the Heaven of Heavens is in the 
zenith of Jerusalem, while in the Figura Universale designed by Duke 
Caetani di Sermoneta, and reproduced in Dinsmore's "Aids to the 
Study of Dante," the same Rose is placed at the opposite pole of the 
Empyrean, and thus at a distance equal to the diameter of the total 
universe. For comparative study, see diagrams in "Studies in Dante," 
by Edward Moore, Third Series, Oxford, 1903; "Dante," by Edward G. 
Gardner, London, 1900; Paget Toynbee's "Dictionary of Dante," Ox- 
ford, 1898; "The Divine Comedy of Dante. Translated into English 
Verse, by John A. Wilstach," Boston, 1888; "Dante's Divine Comedy." 
A commentary by Denton J. Snider, 2 vols., 1893, and others. 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST CI 

upon his genius; for by this fehcitous recon- 
struction of the Earth of the ancients he at 
once and forever delocalized the Divine Pres- 
ence, and reduced to a vanishing point in 
space and power the Mahgn Spirit which in 
all preceding ages had shadowed the thought 
and the lives of men. 



A PRIME REQUISITE IN STUDIES 
LIKE THE PRESENT 



A PRIME REQUISITE IN STUDIES 
LIKE THE PRESENT 

''AH outward vision yields to that within, 
Whereof nor creed nor canon holds the key." 

Would one gain a correct view of the uni- 
verse as pictured in any literary masterpiece 
the first requisite is a willingness, or, rather, 
an eager readiness, to repicture it in thought 
according to the data supplied by the author. 
Many fail to attain the desired end because 
they fail to exercise their imagination upon 
the problem. Especially do they fail when 
they neglect to think out the implications of 
a suggested cosmical feature or adjustment that 
is unfamiliar. When Milton suggests that be- 
fore the fall of man the Earth's axis was not 
inclined as now, but was perpendicular to the 
plane of the sun's orbit, the reader should at 
once imagine himself on such an Earth and 
proceed to inquire into the extent of its un- 
likeness to the Earth we know. A moment's 
careful thought will, of course, convince him 
that at both poles of such an upright sphere 
the sun would always be visible on the horizon, 
and that in the lower latitudes all days and 
nights would be equal. Of course, too, there 

65 



66 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

could be no alternation of summer's heat and 
winter's cold. Milton takes pains to tell us 
this much; but if we take time to think through 
the implications of the suggested cosmical 
adjustment more fully, we quickly make fur- 
ther discoveries. We find that owing to the 
refraction of the sunbeams by the atmosphere 
the lighted side of the supposed Earth would 
always be several degrees more than half of 
the total surface, and the unlighted side several 
degrees less than half. Accordingly, the sun 
would always be visible, not merely at the 
poles, but also several degrees beyond each 
pole. As a consequence, there would be at 
each pole a considerable area where night 
and its stars could never come. Stranger yet, 
we would find that if in one of these illuminated 
circumpolar areas two astronomers, A and B, 
were stationed two miles apart, with the pole 
exactly between them, and were to make a 
solar observation at the same instant, A dating 
his May 31, 11 p. m., and B his June 1, 11 a. m., 
the two dates would be equally correct. Surely, 
discoveries like these amply repay the slight 
effort of thought needed for their making. 

Myopic interpreters of the Odyssey, pos- 
sessed of no imagination, have for centuries 
tried to find Homer's world within the narrow 
limits of Hellas and the Levant. So doing, 
they have not only done violence to a mul- 
titude of passages in detail, but have even 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 67 

missed the author's prime claim upon the 
attention of moderns. Worse than that, being 
instructors of the young, they have been 
bhnd leaders of the blind in all that they have 
written touching the figure of Homer's Earth, 
and the Earth of Homer's contemporaries.^^ 

The Maha-Bharata is the great epic of 
India, one of the greatest in the world. Its 
culminating scene, the ascension of Yudhish- 
thira into the heaven of Indra, is at the summit 
of Mount Meru, the incomparably lofty and 
glorious Paradise Mount at the north pole. 
But for this reason no reader who has not 
exercised his imagination upon the heaven of 
Indra, and upon the mythical relations of 
this Mount to the Varshas of the Earth on 
the one hand, and to the heavens above Indra's 
on the other, can possibly appreciate the sig- 
nificance of the time and place of this ascension, 
and the congruence of the epic incidents and 
speeches leading up thereto. 

But Milton and the other epic-writers are 
not the only persons to make upon the reader 
demands of this kind. The scientist, not 
less than the student of literature has need of 
a constructive space-measuring and space-filling 
imagination. An ancient Greek cosmologist 
tells us that at the beginning of the world one 



'2 For ample justification of the above statement, see Paradise Found, 
pp. 117-122, 328-361, 467-487. Also "Earliest Cosmologies," pp. 70-78, 
157-191. 



68 THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED 

terrestrial day was equal to ten of our present 
months. Had he said twelve months instead 
of ten, he would have simplified his challenge 
to our thought, and perhaps made it more 
effective. In that case he would at once have 
started us upon the inquiry as to the effects 
of such a Year-day upon our sunrises and 
sunsets. And here, again, but little thought 
would be required to show us that to an ob- 
server at the pole under the supposed con- 
ditions, the inclination of the Earth's axis 
remaining as at present, sunrise would no 
longer be in a spiral, as now, but would be in 
an apparently straight line directly up from 
the horizon toward the zenith; only so slow 
that at the end of three months the sun would 
have attained an altitude of but twenty-three 
and a half degrees. Then — portentous sign — 
it would stop, and for the next three months 
slowly sink along the line of its rising, and 
then disappear, to rise and set in the same 
deliberate and apparently futile manner at 
the opposite pole.^^ 

Mental exercises of the kind just indulged 
in are not to be lightly esteemed and dismissed 
as merely entertaining; they often prove of 
highest value. The great astronomers of his- 
tory would never have made the advances with 
which they have enriched the world had they 



1^ For other anomalous experiences possible only in the circumpolar 
regions, see Earliest Cosmologies, pp. 124ff. 



IN MILTON'S PARADISE LOST 69 

not possessed and cultivated this faculty of 
seeing beyond the immediately visible, and of 
making themselves thoroughly at home in 
conceived-of environments utterly unfamiliar. 
And it may be added that this Greek reminder 
of the relativity of our most common chrono- 
metric units, the day and the year, prepares 
one in a unique manner for a readier grasp 
of many a detail in the teachings of the an- 
cients relative to the World Periods, or Ages, 
into which Creation's lifetime was by them 
divided, and in which, in one ethnic form or 
another, in one sseculum or another, about 
every process in nature known to us as nor- 
mal is held to be precisely 'the reverse of what 
once was, or in some coming age will be the 
normal. For the Babylonian, Buddhist, Egyp- 
tian, Greek and Roman, Jewish, Mohammedan, 
and Zoroastrian ideas on these mundane 
recurrences, see ^'Encyclopaedia of Religion and 
Ethics," vol. i, pp. 183-290. Here the time- 
world and the space-world are curiously com- 
bined, and the history of human thought 
respecting them illustrated in a manner which 
neither science alone, nor literature alone, 
could equal. And, strange to say, the latest 
cosmic speculations of our astronomers and 
physicists, with their alternating world-periods 
of Evolution and Dissolution, seem little more 
than revised editions of prehistoric teachings 
touching the seonian life of the world. 



APPENDIX 

(See Reverse) 



The Diagrams here given first appeared in 
the following publications, to wit: 

No. I in the Bibliographical, Biographical, and Expository Introduc- 
tion to Masson's three-volumed Library edition of Milton's Poetical 
Works, London, 1874. 

Nos. II and VII in Study of Paradise Lost, by Professor John Andrew 
Himes, Philadelphia, 1878. 

Nos. Ill and IV in Milton's Paradise Lost, Books First and Second, 
with Introduction, Notes, and Diagrams. By Homer B. Sprague, Ph.D., 
Boston, 1879. 

No. V in The Astronomy of Milton's Paradise Lost, by Thomas N. 
Orchard, M.D., 2d edition, London, 1913. 

Masson reprinted his with a slightly modified text in his Life of John 
Milton, Vol. VI, pp. 518-557. 

Himes reprinted his in the slightly modified form given at the bottom 
of tliis page, in an edition of Paradise Lost issued by him in the year 
1898. It is here reproduced with the courteous consent of the author 
and by arrangement with The American Book Company, his publishers. 

Orchard's modification of No. V was given to the public in April, 
1915, and is here reproduced by permission. 

All of the above works have rendered valuable service, and may still 
be used with profit by students and teachers. 



^^S EMPy^^ 




HIMES'S REVISED DIAGRAM OF MILTOn's UNIVEBSB 



72 



I. MILTON'S UNIVERSE AS INTERPRE- 
TED BY DAVID MASSON 




73 



in 



W 
O 

o 
o 

P^ 
P^ 



ui 
P4 

> 

I— I 

O 
H 




III. MILTON'S UNIVERSE AS INTER- 
PRETED BY HOMER B. SPRAGUE 




VERTICAL SECTION, 

Showing (conjectural! y) IMilton's cosmography, — the Empyreal Heavens, our 

Starry Universe, Hell, and Chaos. 



75 



IV. AN ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETA- 
TION BY HOMER B. SPRAGUE 





VERTICAL SECTION 
(Sprague thinks this "perhaps more satisfactory" than the preceding.) 



76 



V. MILTON'S UNIVERSE AS INTERPRETED 
BY THOMAS N. ORCHARD 



Diagram as published in 1913. 



^£A\/^^ ^^ "^^^ E^MPYREAlSI 




VI. MILTON'S UNIVERSE AS INTER- 
PRETED BY THOMAS N. ORCHARD 



Diagram as modified in 1915. 



VAtAVHlN OR THE EMPYRE:/\fvj 




78 



VII. ''THIRD CIRCLE" OF MILTON'S 
HELL, ACCORDING TO HIMES 

NORTH. 




SOUTH. 



79 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Anaxagoras, 40 
Anu, 31 
Archelaus, 40 

Bacon, 9 
Brahma, 59 
Brooke, Stopford, 46 

Caetani di Sermoneta, 60 
Castrogiovanni, 56 
Chambers, 15 
Channing, 5 
Chaucer, 16 
Columbus, 40 
Copernicus, 9 

Dante, 11, 36, 55, 56, 60 

Dinsmore, 60 

Diogenes of Apollonia, 40 

Dore, G., 57 

Dreyer, J. L. E., 18, 40 

Ea, 31 

Empedocles, 40 

Galileo, 9 
Gardner, E. G., 60 

Hegel, 10 
Henderson, 58 
Himes, 13, et passim 
Homer, 66, 67 
Huet, Bishop, 54 

Indra, 58, 67 
Ishtar, 31 

Kepler, 9 



Lenormant, F., 60 
Leukippos, 40 
Livingstone, 55 

Marduk, 31 
Masson, 13, et passim 
Menzel, W., 47 
Moore, E., 60 
Mui-ray, J. A. H., 17 

Nabu, 31 
Nergal, 31 
Ninib, 31 

O'Neill, John, 49 

Orchard, Thomas N. , 13, ei passim 

Plato, 11, 14, 16, 18 
Ptolemy, 11, 18, 56 

Rossetti, 60 

Sayce, 18 

Shakespeare, 16 

Shamash, 31 

Sin, 31 

Snider, D. J., 60 

Spenser, Edmund, 16 

Sprague, H. B., 13, et passim 

Toynbee, Paget, 60 

Verity, 51 

Wilstach, J. A., 60 

Yudhishthira, 67 



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